Once very often, social media lights up with opinions about the Javascript language, frameworks and its ecosystem being terrible. Some time ago, there was one around React framework, and the question was whether putting all HTML/CSS/JavaScript in one file is a really a good thing, which is against the age old practice of separation of these technologies.

Whenever people question the new ways of doing things, I am reminded of one of the greatest quotes by the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa (4th century CE).

“Just because its old, something cannot be assumed right. Just because its new, something can’t be brushed away. The smart ones analyze and adapt, the fools are swayed by others’ opinions”.

Many retweets, faves, dislikes, epics, savages later, the question still remains: What is the right language or framework?

The separation of technologies then, say 15 years ago, was not intentional. It was a necessity of times. CSS, HTML, JS were advancing independently, performance in browsers were so poor and finding an engineer who could do all was almost impossible. But now, we still have specialists designers and developers, but in general they have a good idea about the other technologies. I still remember back in my IBM days, pointing out to JSP structures to our designer, on where to make style changes. But now these frameworks and their idiosyncrasies are not strange to designers.

Here are my thoughts on why it is pointless criticizing the Javascript world for its organic growth, and equally pointless to criticize the criticism.

Whether “language purists” like it or not, Javascript is ubiquitous. Yes, that’s very hard to digest. Despite its “severe short comings”, it has conquered the net. Why? As IT engineers, we keep holding ourselves to this arbitrary sense of “perfection” and trying to judge everything against it. Typed languages, OO Patterns, Functional paradigms, Modularity, Testability – we seem to know what should be “right” and we are inching towards it – but we just aren’t there yet, we say. But we will know when we reach it, we say. Really? Every language invented since Javascript, seems to be solving the same problem of types, patterns, modularity, dependency etc, only in different syntax combinations.

Here is a fundamental question: Have we got anything right at all in the programming industry at the first stab? Or is 50 years too short to judge? The real limit of the problem is that physiologically, human brains can only process a limited amount of information, so it has to break complex into simple pieces. Eventually the simple pieces evolve to become complex enough, or perhaps our brains shrink so it perceives simple things as complex. So they have to be broken again. But the broken simple pieces have something in common with previously broken simpler pieces that they have to re-integrated. Thus we swing into an eternal pendulum of centralization and distribution.

Here is an illustration with evolution of Java, but you can substitute it with any starter technology:

Java and JVM were originally built for small devices

But once it entered application server space, EJBs were added to tackle distributed environments.

EJBs became so complex, it was abandoned and broken into smaller pieces

Smaller pieces were dependency-injected to form a bigger solution, but eventually they grouped into micro services

Container architectures are becoming complex and are yielding to orchestration solutions like Swarm and Kubernetes

Predictably, By induction, orchestration solutions will become complex and will yield to Local Clouds

Predictably, commodity local clouds will be broken into Fogs, Cirrus, Altostratus, Cumulus … and delivered by drones.

Predictably, Drones functionality will super-evolve, so they will eventually need a new programming language specifically written for small devices… well…

Much like a fractal, as we dissolve complex problems into simple solutions, they just take a new shape of complexity, due to external influences (mobile, bandwidth for eg). The point is – This cycle will never end.

Working as a Web + Network application engineer (on the SDN controller OpenDaylight) I am seeing two ends (philosophically speaking, they are the ends and the means respectively) of a spectrum. Both UI and Network are always evolving in interesting ways, yet we can analyze these two into a fundamental problem statement:

Network: Deliver content (a packet) from one place to another place, efficiently.
UI: Deliver content (html) from one place to another place, for a user friendly read.

(Of course I am intentionally oversimplifying, but as an end user, when your bandwidth drops below 1Mbps, you call up the customer service to negotiate a discount, not enquire the complexity of the network protocols).

But just to solve the packet delivery problem, think about myriads of protocols and schemes created – TCP/IP, VLAN, MPLS, BGP, VXLAN, OpenFlow, NETCONF and many combinations of these. Similarly in the UI world, all we have to do is deliver readable content, but there are so many aspects and choose-your-noun libraries CSS, SASS, WebPack, D3, Material, visualization, accessibility, modularity, layouts and the most subjective of all – Colors!

So why do front-end developers keep seeking and preferring newer frameworks? There are many reasons and not all are technical. The fundamental reason is: Boredom. Human mind always seeks something new. Not because its useful, but it has to be something just different. And perhaps have a personality.

For any framework in general, to be popular and become sustaining, it should satisfy ALL these conditions:

A very nice familiar sounding easy-to-pronounce name

Should NOT be one person driven

Code should be easy to change and testable

Good documentation

Not do too much magic

Ability to teach it easily to others

The golden rule of framework success is this: It takes a few smart developers to create an idea. It takes a few hundred average developers to sustain it, because the smart developers have moved on to a new idea.

Let me start with a mandatory statement that many first-use-React-blogs start with: “I have played a bit with React and its great. And…”

Having recently completed a decent sized project in ReactJS, I have to say, once in a while there comes a library or framework that truly makes you go back to the basics and think. Despite much gained knowledge, it is fascinating to see that human brain collectively misses the fundamentals as “progress” happens. Much like an experienced cricketer suddenly losing ‘form’ and is adviced to go back to basics. It is not that he forgot to how hold his bat, but that intuitive coordination or that ‘elegant touch’ has disappeared. Perhaps we humans are not wired to over-learn! From simple to complicated to simple, we keep oscillating, just like we keep regurgitating the centralized and distributed system concepts.

It also emphasizes two underestimated facts in software engineering:

1. Creating good software is hard
2. Keeping it simple is even harder

I still remember Rod Johnson’s impacting book ‘Java without EJB’, (I was advocating the same in one of my early projects – removing all EJBs because its complexity did not make sense and the book gave me a lot of cannon). Spring framework made a great impact on many web developers then, bringing in IoC principles into a Java container. (Spring wasnt the first one though, PicoContainer was).

Facebook’s ReactJS is one such framework going back to basics. Apart from the usually quoted strong features like VirtualDom, simple lifecycle model and one-way data flow, what is it that really made React tick? After all component based frameworks are not new – Awt/Swing, Tapestry, Vaadin, GWT, JSF/Seam, Wicket (all Java based) and several Javascript-based were successful – but they all fell into the trap of hiding the complexity of Javascript (and to some extent HTML/CSS) from the developer and that turned out to be a costly decision. Everytime Javascript and HTML standards evolve or browsers support something new, these frameworks have to undergo quite a bit of refactoring. Remember, both designers and front-end developers ultimately like to nano-control the HTML output.

Among the existing component frameworks, the gap between the ‘framework’ and Javascript/HTML is shortest in React. Compared to many frameworks that advocate a structure like .html,.js and .css for each component, React neatly rolls them all into one testable unit, surrounding it with a simple lifecycle. And with the virtual-dom concept, you can apply same concepts to mobile or even desktop apps.

Some complain that JSX is ugly. I first thought same, (I am not a big fan of XML based structures), but it took me all of 10 minutes to overcome it. In fact, I think its one of the smarter things that has come out of React: making Javascript expressions look like HTML. It is quicker to learn JSX than yet another templating language. Passing properties and reading state just feels syntactically familiar.

Another common complaint about JSX is that it makes if conditions and for-each syntactically harder, compared to say AngularJS ng:if/ng:repeat or Handlebar-type syntaxes.

While the JSX version does not look concise, the ‘if’ and ‘for/map’ are natural and readable in programmatic syntax than in declarative syntax. Not only that, it can be elevated to a function to make the component reusable. And then it also provides an incentive to make the function stateless – so the component is now slowly turning into a dumb component. AngularJS, though concise, feels more XML-ly than React and you cannot reuse the <span> element as-is in some other place or context (unless you elevate it to a directive). The JSX downside appears to be that you keep creating component wrappers, but isn’t that problem to solve – making composability easier?

The biggest advantage of such componentization is, it also makes unit testing much more delightful. In our project, we use Mocha+Chai+Sinon, which seem to work pretty well. In React, you start to think in terms of composability, than just a page. Many a time, we wrote a complex component, but quickly dissolved/abstracted it into dumb components, by breaking out its props and state.

That’s another thing about React – the learning curve and refactoring is comparitively less steep than others, with only a few concepts to learn.

I am also often asked how long will this framework last? Will Polymers and Web Components take over the browsers? Unfortunately, the Delorean only went upto 2015 and the Almanac probably did not mention React.